New York Burning: Liberty, Slavery, and Conspiracy in Eighteenth-Century Manhattan

New York Burning is perhaps best understood as a tale of mass hysteria, in which people project their own fears onto real life events and behave in a panicked, frenzied way. While Lepore does not dispute that unhappy slaves in 1741 might have set fire to homes, Lepore does suggest that fears of a widespread uprising—and in particular, Horsmanden’s belief that the fires stem from an international conspiracy—are overblown and detached from the reality of what occurred.

In Chapter 2, “Fire,” Lepore describes the speed at which panic can spread in a city like New York. 18th-century New York society is suffused with a mood of paranoia, with New Yorkers often suspecting that the city is full of “plotters lurking behind nearly every shadow” (51). This atmosphere of suspicion becomes combined with widespread anxieties surrounding New York’s slave population. New York newspapers frequently carry news of slave uprisings throughout the colonies, with the stories often suspiciously matching the genre conventions of popular fiction of rebellions. While some of these slave rebellions are true, more often than not, they are fabricated tales based upon rumors.